Women's beauty, women's duty

I enjoy watching Miss America beauty pageants, especially the part where the final contestants are asked questions about poverty, International politics and education, to name a few grandiose topics.

The all-round pretence is that the responses, which supposedly manifest the woman's intellectuality and social and moral compass, will be the clincher. The woman who gives the best answer will win the crown of America's most "beautiful" female (under 21 and under 140 lb of body weight).

My pleasure is perverse: it's generated by the ways in which the contestants, usually very thin and tall women, hem and haw, and usually stumble in their "spontaneous" responses.

My pleasure, as Aristotle would say, is entirely dependent on the contestants' slipping and falling, to make me laugh, when answering questions of social, moral and political gravity. 

This year there will be more pleasure in store because I hear that a record number of women had auditioned for the beauty pageant. The pageant will be held in Atlantic City, a location that has historical resonance because this is where feminists had gathered to protest the blatant sexist crudity of the pageant in 1968.

I hope one of the questions this time is about Syria's Bashar Assad and chemical weapons and what the bone-revealing beauties (I swear, their shoulder bones stick out of their flesh, I've seen it) think of Vladimir Putin's ascension from rogue politician to global peace-broker.

It's said that women's "beauty" is celebrated in the Miss USA and other beauty pageants across the globe.

Courtney Martin, a writer on women's health and other issues, says that it is any self-respecting woman's duty to protest the particular image of women's beauty that the Miss USA pageant sells.

Why? Because:

Authentic, messy, transcendent beauty cannot be scored. It isn't tamed, plucked, planned, premeditated or rehearsed, and people like Donald Trump, who own the Miss USA beauty pageant, aren't purveyors of it.
Real beauty is about resilience: Girls and women who have been through something and come out the other side with an idiosyncratic scar or a hard-earned wrinkle, like the first lines of a powerful story. If there were a pageant where girls were asked, "When did you really get lost and how did you find your way back to yourself?" I would be there myself.
Beauty pageants should die because they are money making machines fueled by female insecurity and submission.
Beauty is an organic process, not a contest.